Austin Kleon

In praise of the good old-fashioned hobby

“Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.”
—Hugh MacLeod

In chapter 5 of Steal Like An Artist, I sing the praises of the good-old fashioned hobby, the thing you do outside of work, for fun. “A hobby is something creative that’s just for you. You don’t try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives but doesn’t take.”

Since I wrote that over half a decade ago, things have just gotten worse in America, and as steady jobs keep disappearing and the market continues to gobble up the culture, the “free time” activities which used to soothe us and take our minds off work and add meaning to our lives are now presented to us as potential income streams. (“Make money doing what you love!”)

how to stay alive

This week Ann Friedman wrote the piece I’ve been wanting to write, “Not Everything Is a Side Hustle.” Like me, she grew up in the Midwest, “practically born with a glue gun in my hand,” and she now practices a kind of “general craftiness.” Her new thing is deviled eggs (a personal favorite of mine):

For the past few years, I’ve been bringing these eggy experiments with me to barbecues and potlucks, where, through a mouthful of mayonnaise, someone will suggest that I start a deviled-egg catering business. It is a tempting idea (I could call the business “She-Deviled”!). And I know that people are suggesting egg-entrepreneurship as a compliment—their way of saying, “These are so good I would pay for them!”—but I take the implication seriously. At a time when Etsy shops and craft fairs and food trucks are decidedly mainstream, every domestic hobby is at risk of becoming a side hustle. I don’t want to boil and slice eggs for money. Messing around with a stand mixer or a sewing machine is fun for me because it’s not work. Personal pleasure is what makes a hobby a hobby.

I’m encouraged by Anne’s spirit, and I’ve been seeking other inspirations out there, examples of people who are out there happily practicing and protecting their hobbies.  Oddly, one of my favorite inspirations is fictional and foreign: the BBC series Detectorists, in which two friends go rambling around the countryside with their metal detectors. Director and actor Mackenzie Crook says he got the original inspiration for the show from thinking about hobbies:

I’m fascinated by people and their pastimes and their hobbies, the way people their free time. It seems to me like it’s a very British thing. (I don’t know if it is.) The way people can just immerse themselves and get obsessed by subjects that to a lot of other people would seem like a dull way to spend a weekend. I wanted it to be an affectionate study of people and their pastimes. I decided on metal detecting as a good… you know, there’s lots of metaphors there for what they’re really looking for in their lives.

Spoiler alert: a hobby which at first seems to simply be about seeking fortune in buried treasure turns out to be more about the hunt and spending time with your mates. I love how the show celebrates people doing something that everybody else thinks is a complete waste of time. In one episode, the character Lance talks about how a hobby is better if people don’t understand it: “What you want is for your partner to shake her head, roll her eyes, and look at you and say, ‘You and your hobbies.’”

George Carlin said he didn’t have hobbies, he had interests. “Hobbies cost money. Interests are free.” I think you need both, and I wonder if Crook’s hunch about the British being better at hobbies is true — it certainly feels true to me. As our empire crumbles, we would do well to observe how citizens of former empires enjoy a nice pint, a ramble, and a bit of tinkering.

3 quick thoughts about copyright

Pretty much every time there is a plagiarism or copyright case in the news, someone will ask me for my opinion. Most of the time I not only don’t have an opinion, I don’t want to have an opinion, because having an opinion — artistic or legal — would require me to: 1) investigate whatever pop singer or cultural producer is being accused of infringing  2) think about copyright law. There are so many other smart people thinking about it, like Lessig, Doctorow, Hyde, Ferguson, etc., and, I mean, if I wanted to think about copyright law all day, I’d have done what my parents wanted me to do and gone to law school.

That said, I’m writing this blog post as a placeholder (or thought-holder) so that I can link to it whenever somebody asks me what I think about so-and-so ripping off so-and-so:

1. Copyright is not a bad thing. 

Because I wrote a book called Steal Like An Artist, many assume I’m some sort of copyright crusader, that I think copyright should be abolished. Nope! Copyright keeps a roof over our heads and food in my kids’ bellies. The whole point of copyright law is to encourage people to share their creative work for everyone’s benefit by making sure the creators can be fairly compensated for it. (Do I think the copyright system in the U.S. has been completely twisted by gigantic corporations? Yes.) Steal Like An Artist is not a book about copyright infringement. If you’re a good thief, you don’t get caught: You transform your influences, so that the stolen parts become a new whole. (People also think I’m a fan of any kind of remix—not true! Like every other kind of creative work, I think that 90% of remixes are crap.) Furthermore, I think that legal constraints can lead to interesting artistic constraints.

2. Responses to claims of plagiarism are more interesting than the plagiarism itself.

How the accused, the accuser, and spectators respond to claims of infringement tells you loads about them and how they think about creative work. For example, plagiarism is not very interesting in itself, but an author’s attempts to justify it can be. It’s also fun to watch the web unravel when lawyers get lathered up and fingers start being pointed: I’ve seen artists accuse other artists of ripping off their work, only to be found out later for having ripped off their work from another artist!

One of my favorite responses to a lawsuit was James Cameron’s attorney, who wrote that Cameron is the “most original and creative person in the motion picture business today” and doesn’t need to copy from anybody. (Ron Howard narrator’s voice: “He does.”)

Juries are a whole other can of worms: One person’s transformation is another person’s infringement, and if you think about how little your average person understands about art and music, there’s no telling what a jury will decide.

3. What is right is not necessarily legal and what is legal is not necessarily right.

I think of copyright cases like Elmore Leonard novels: there’s a bag of money and everybody’s trying to get their hands on it. The smaller the turf, the bigger the war, and as it becomes harder and harder to make a living, as the collective bag of money for musicians and other artists shrinks and shrinks, there will be plenty of attorneys happy to resort to suing for whatever’s up for grabs.

The real winners in any copyright case are the lawyers. It rarely has anything to do with the art. Every artist knows that art comes from art—it’s only the honest ones who admit it. But the reality is we live with a legal system that leads to musicians being advised not to acknowledge any influence whatsoever. Hide the truth and cover your ass — like everything else in American life, we’re stuck navigating between what we know is right and real and what’s the law.

PS. The collage above is a homage to the monkey selfie case.

Remember your heroes

This is one of my favorite pages from the new 2018 calendar. (You may recognize it from the journal, too.)

I’ve always kept pictures of my heroes above my desk to keep watch over me, like guardian spirits, to remind me who I want to be. These days they help me remember who I wanted to be when I first got started.

Man, there are so many things to push you off your path. Maybe you get a taste of success and say, “Oh, well now it’s time to get serious.” Or maybe you fall into a career you didn’t plan on. Maybe people start lumping you in with some contemporaries you never asked to be lumped in with. Maybe somebody dangles some easy-looking money at you. In my experience, at some point you will wonder what the heck you’re doing and what you should do next.

Your heroes can help. Much depends, of course, on the quality of one’s heroes, but looking to them can help you get re-aligned with yourself. Sometimes it’s a stern look to say, “Stop f***ing this up.” Sometimes it’s a wink, to say “keep going, baby.” (Some of them you need at eye level, which is why I have Queen Lynda keeping watch over my writing desk.)

One of my favorite writer/directors, Billy Wilder, he kept a sign in his office that reminded him of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, “How would Lubitsch do it?”

(The Paris Review asked him, “Well, how did he do it?” and part of Wilder’s answer was: “It’s funny, but we noticed that whenever he came up with an idea, I mean a really great idea, it was after he came out of the can. I started to suspect that he had a little ghostwriter in the bowl of the toilet there.”)

Anyways. Remember your heroes. They can help.

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